Sorry, I'm pretty awful at remembering to update this newfangled internet thing. I seem to just ride my bike, work, and ride my bike to work, leaving little time for remembering to do things. You should see my sink. You probably don't want to see my sink.

Huge thanks to Bruce and Walp for their donations to the AIDS/LifeCycle to sponsor my ride!

About 15 minutes after mentioning that I was tracking my rides on runkeeper, I switched to strava. It seems to work a bit better with my gps. You can keep tabs on my riding at http://app.strava.com/athletes/jbeckham. I also embedded some newfangled internet things into the left side over there, if you are Mom and Dad. (I'm pretty sure everyone else who still sees this uses RSS.)

I've started riding to work occasionally. 40-45 miles on a bicycle to get to the office sounds a bit crazy, but the scenery along the way is too awesome to pass up. I've ridden through herds of deer (carefully!), through fog-filled forested valleys, along ridges with both the ocean and the bay in full view, and all while just going to work. And then I can eat three lunches during the day because I burned 2000 calories getting to work. Infinite sandwiches? Sign me up.

UPDATED HERO LIST:

• Mike Brown!
• Jason Lunz!
• Mom and Dad Beckham!
• Bruce Labatte!
• Nathan Walp!

Quick hero update: Mike Brown, Jason Lunz, and Mom and Dad Beckham are awesome.

The ride benefits the SF AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center. Both help people with HIV live better lives (counseling, free/low-cost medical care, the list obviously goes on) and both work to make HIV a thing of the past through education and advocacy. Good people doing good stuff.

Executive summary: I am riding the AIDS Lifecycle this year, to raise money for both the SF AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay & Lesbian Center... and to get to ride a bike a whole long way along a ridiculously beautiful coastline. I really need your help with donations, needing to raise $3k in order to ride. Here's the link to the donation site: http://www.tofighthiv.org/goto/beckham Thanks, you are my hero.

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I'm currently biking one gojillion* miles a week to get in good enough shape to ride 545 miles in 7 days. Today I did 69 miles, which is currently the longest I've gone... but it's easy to go a long way if you don't have to bike the next day. I have to figure out how to do over 100 miles in a day without getting to recover with a lazy Monday (and Tuesday).

I'm using runkeeper to track my workouts, so if you're interested in seeing where or how far I'm rolling, clicky clicky.

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Honestly, between biking and working I seriously doubt I'll have time to do anything fancy on here... but I would love to make a thing on the left side to track both total miles and who's ridiculously awesome. (Ridiculously awesome enough to donate money to fight AIDS and to get me to bike a whole long way.) I'll just go ahead and do the more important one manually...
HEROES!:

• Mike Brown!
• Jason Lunz!
• Mom and Dad Beckham!

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*Obviously one gojillion is something less than 545 miles.

Executive summary: I am riding the AIDS Lifecycle this year, to raise money for both the SF AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay & Lesbian Center... and to get to ride a bike a whole long way along a ridiculously beautiful coastline. I really need your help with donations, needing to raise $3k in order to ride. Here's the link to the donation site: http://www.tofighthiv.org/goto/beckham Thanks, you are my hero.

---

I'm currently biking one gojillion* miles a week to get in good enough shape to ride 545 miles in 7 days. Today I did 69 miles, which is currently the longest I've gone... but it's easy to go a long way if you don't have to bike the next day. I have to figure out how to do over 100 miles in a day without getting to recover with a lazy Monday (and Tuesday).

I'm using runkeeper to track my workouts, so if you're interested in seeing where or how far I'm rolling, clicky clicky.

---

Honestly, between biking and working I seriously doubt I'll have time to do anything fancy on here... but I would love to make a thing on the left side to track both total miles and who's ridiculously awesome. (Ridiculously awesome enough to donate money to fight AIDS and to get me to bike a whole long way.) I'll just go ahead and do the more important one manually...
HEROES!:

• Mike Brown!
• Jason Lunz!
• Mom and Dad Beckham!

---

*Obviously one gojillion is something less than 545 miles.

A local coffee shop charges $3.35 for a medium latte with two shots of espresso, and $3.70 for a large latte with three shots of espresso. Additional shots of espresso cost $0.65. I normally just order a medium latte with an extra shot because I know that it's not worth the $0.30 savings to try to get a large latte without the full load of steamed milk.

Today I was feeling frisky, so I attempted to order a "large latte in a medium cup." The immediate response was "that's impossible." I was reminded of Carol Beer.

After some back and forth, one of the more experienced baristas offered some assistance and said "just order a large latte with room."

That almost worked... tomorrow I'm going to order "a large latte with room with room with room with room with room." Hopefully they can hit the "with room" button enough to simulate my paying an extra $0.30 for a negative amount of milk.

I forgot about you. Sorry if you've been feverishly refreshing this page since October.

I've been having fun exploring my new job and my new town. A bulleted list:

• I've gotten back into climbing.
• I haven't done as much hiking as I'd like because there's too much to do that's more convenient than a 40 minute bike ride over to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
• I ride my bike to work every day. The weather here is obnoxiously flawless.
• I've gotten even more snobby about beer, as you may have noticed from my beerblog.
• I still suffer with javans, but at least a significant portion of this batch seems to understand that there's a world outside of their Most Holy Virtual Machine.
• I've had a lot of visitors, and I've got a bunch more over the coming months. It's fun living somewhere that people want to visit! (When are you visiting, again?)

I've gotta get back to visiting with family... I'm in Clinton, Missouri for the weekend for my grandmother's funeral. It's been nice spending time with a side of the family I rarely see, even if it required a rather epic three flight journey. (Thanks for visiting me at one of those airports, Jay & Becca!)

I'm finally moving from doing nothing to having a job again! It's in a wildly different industry from anything I've done before, so I'm really looking forward to learning whatever there might be to learn. (I'm still not entirely sure what it actually entails, but life's much more fun when upcoming challenges are able to blindside you.)

Since my last post, I've attempted two hiking trips, vaguely gotten back into climbing, visited a few cities, dabbled in a few interesting but largely useless projects and wondered about where I'd end up after this last round of shakeups came to a close. San Francisco it is!

The hiking trips were both abortive efforts, the first lasting less than a day before my waterlogged boots forced my knees out of the woods and the second ending a day early after a little gastroparty with my friend E. coli. Even so, it was nice to get back to the woods for a little while. Note to self: avoid the spinach omelet at that diner near Penn.

As for those projects, a couple of them are too facile to give much mention, including a bit of an extension to a bit of sample code I whipped up last spring and a beefing up of the guts of my beerblog. The others weren't really fun enough to provide my wandering noggin with enough incentive to finish, they included an automatic crossword puzzle solver (feed in the weekly Merle and it'd output the solution or melt the internet trying) and an implementation of a few of the Project GIPF games (this has been done to a pulp, it was more of a way to rewet my feet with some infrequently used tools).

I suppose now's a good time to get back to packing for my upcoming move... luckily I don't really own anything, so I ought to be able to jam the majority of my necessary possessions into my luggage. I return to employment on Friday!